This subpage provides very
brief biographical notes regarding individuals who are important
theorists, researchers, or contibutors to narrative psychology,
the interpretive turn in psychology and the social sciences,
and the diverse influences upon narrative which this resource
guide details.

Dan P. McAdams was born February
7, 1954 in Lynwood, CA and completed his bachelor's degree at
Valparaiso University in 1976. He received his doctorate in developmental
psychology from Harvard University in 1979 completing a dissertation
entitled Validation Of A Thematic Coding System For The Intimacy
Motive. He worked briefly as a supervisor of clinical testing
at Cambridge City Hospital (MA) and as a visiting instructor
at the University of Minnesota (Twin City)'s Institure of Child
Development before assuming a fulltime faculty appointment at
Loyola University of Chicago in 1980. He moved to to Northwestern
University in 1989 where he holds a joint appointment as Professor
of Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
and of Human Development and Social Policy in the School of Education
and Social Policy. He is the director of the Foley
Center for the Study of Lives. With the shift of publication
of the series, The Narrative Study of Lives, from Sage
Publications to the American Psychological Association in 2000,
McAdams has joined Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich as an
overall editor for the series. He has also shown a strong interest
in teaching and pedagogy (he is the author of an important classroom
text in personality) and also is the Charles Deering McCormick
Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern.

McAdams' work over the last
two decades has focused upon a set of interrelated themes and
approaches. These have included the question of the life story
and the development of the self and personal identity, generativity
in adult life and its origins and course over the span of development,
and the notion of the redemptive (vs. contaminated) self. He
advocates a nuanced structural theory of the personality in which
the self displays three increasing levels of integration: (1)
dispositional traits, (2) characteristic adaptations which relate
to an individual's motives and beliefs, and (3) integrative life
stories. McAdams and his colleagues regularly use both qualitative
and quantitative measures in their personality and developmental
research programs. He has authored or developed the Life
Story Interview method, the Guided
Autobiography, the Loyola
Generativity Scale, and a set of coding manuals by which
to analyze the stories of research participants.

Personality,
Psychobiography, and Psychology of the Life Story: Bibliography:
Dan
P. McAdams

Born in Massachusetts, he moved
to Oberlin, OH as a boy. There his father, a clergyman &
preacher, taught at Oberlin College where Mead was to complete
his own undergraduate education (1879-1983). Prior to master's
study at Harvard in philosophy, Mead worked in the Pacific Northwest
as a surveyor. He completed an MA in Philosophy at Harvard in
1888 where he worked with Josiah Royce and served as a tutor
to the children of William
James. Mead traveled to Europe to study for a Ph.D. in psychology
at the University of Leipzig under Wundt.
Though studying with both Wundt and G. S. Hall, he soon transfered
from Leipzig to the University of Berlin before returning to
the United States in 1891 without his doctoral degree. He taught
at the University of Michigan until he joined the faculty of
the new University of Chicago in 1892 at the invitation of John
Dewey to teach philosophy. A major theorist of American pragmatism,
Mead cooperated extensively in the educational reform movement
initiated by Dewey and remained at Chicago when Dewey left for
Columbia University. He worked also with social reformer, Jane
Addams ,while also editing the journal, The Elementary School
Teacher. He came into conflict with Robert Maynard Hutchins,
the new President of the University of Chicago, and accepted
an offer to move to Columbia University to teach in the Fall
of 1931. However, Mead died in the spring of 1931 before he could
take up that post. It is notable that Mead never published any
books during his lifetime. Those volumes appearing with his name
as author were posthumously assembled from either his papers
or transcripts (from various sources) of his class lectures and
edited by his students and colleagues.

The IEP
article provides a comprehensive review of G. H. Mead's theory
of the self and society.

Professor of Social Psychology
in the Department of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School

Mishler completed his doctoral
degree at the University of Michigan in 1951 (Dissertation: Personality
Characteristics And The Resolution Of Role Conflicts). As
a social psychologist and medical anthropologist, Mishler has
championed nuanced, but innovative approaches to research interviewing
within the medical context. He has been a teacher of qualitative
approaches to research for many years and revered by several
generation of students in the Boston area who have studied with
him.

Sources: American
Men & Women of Science. A biographical directory of today's
leaders in physical, biological, and related sciences. 13th edition,
Social & Behavioral Sciences. One volume. New York: R.R.
Bowker Co., 1978

Moreno,
Jacob Levy (1892-1974)

The founder of psychodrama,
sociometry, and group psychotherapy.

Jacob L. Moreno (originally
Moreno Nisslam Levy) was born on May 20, 1892 (alternately, in
some sources, May 18, 1889) in Bucharest, Rumania to sephardic
Jewish parents. In 1894 at age two (alternately, four), his family
moved to Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He early decided upon a career in medicine and, after studying
mathematics and philosophy at the University of Vienna, he began
his training as a doctor there in 1912. During his years as a
medical student, Moreno became involved in various projects involving
storytelling to children and group work with prostitutes of the
Am Spittelberg District in the capital city. In this period,
Moreno settled upon a number of crucial insights including a
rejection of Freudian theory and its negative views toward "acting
out" as well as reflecting on the potential for personal
change which could be effected within group social settings.
He claimed in later life to have coined the term "group
psychotherapy" during this time.

Moreno received his M.D. degree
in 1917 and was soon appointed as superintendent of a children's
hospital in Mittendorf. The patients there were refugees from
the Tyrol and the advance of Italian troops. In his role, Moreno
closely observed the social organization of the children, their
parents and families as well as the shifting alliances and groupings
of the wider community. These observations led to further reflection
on the ways in which social systems functioned. He practiced
psychotherapy in Vienna and the nearby Volsau from 1919 until
he left for America in 1925. He also founded a monthly literary
and philosophical publication, Daimon, the first of a
range of subsequent publications he began throughout his life.
One of Daimon's contributing editors was the Jewish existential
philosopher, Martin Buber.

Beginning in 1921, Moreno began
experimenting with the use of dramatic or theatrical methods
as a means of treating groups of individuals. His "Komendian
Haus" experiment that year was followed soon thereafter
with the founding of Das Stegreiftheater or The Sponteneity
Theater. This facility used improvisational drama and served
as a kind of testing ground for his emerging ideas about psychiatric
treatment means of theatrical practices. In the early 1920s,
Moreno also developed a complementary set of ideas which he termed
sociometry, a research method which detailed the social
structure of entire groups.

This development of psychodrama
and sociometry continued after Moreno's arrival in the United
States in 1925. He established a psychiatric office in New York
City and, at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, briefly worked
with children through psychodramatic techniques. In 1929, Moreno
organized an Impromptu Theater at Carnegie Hall which met three
times weekly and employed psychodrama and group psychotherapy.
In 1931, he carried out a series of studies at Sing Sing prison
in New York on sociometry and used the term "group psychotherapy"
for the first time publicly at the 1932 American Psychiatric
Association meeting in Philadelphia. The following year, he began
a long-term sociometric study (1933-1938) at the New York State
Training School for Girls at Hudson, NY with Helen H. Jennings
as his co-investigator. Results of this work -- about 100 "sociograms"
illustrating the social structure of the School's population
-- were displayed at the NY State Medical Society meeting that
year. In 1934 he published his fundamental analysis of community
and social groups in Who Shall Survive? and introduced
psychodrama to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, one
of the most innovative psychiatric facilities in the country.
In 1936, Moreno opened his own sanatarium at Beacon, NY, a small
city along the Hudson River about 60 miles north of New York
City. This facility included a theater built to permit psychodrama
sessions. In 1937, he began publication of Sociometry:
A Journal of Inter-Personal Relations. This scientific
journal was initially edited by the eminent social psychologist
Gardner Murphy and served as an influential outlet for his work
as well as other social scientists interested in role theory
and the behavior of groups.

Moreno never held a long-term
academic appointment, but did teach for short periods at the
New School for Social Research (1937-38), Columbia University
(1939-40), and other institutions in the United States and elsewhere.
The late 1940s saw the introduction of psychodrama at various
psychiatric institutions, for example, the Boston Psycopathic
Hospital and Veterans Hospitals in Los Angeles, Kanasa, Arkansas,
and other venues. Following the Second World War, Moreno also
began to foster psychodrama in Europe (including France in 1947
and Czechoslovakia in 1959 and 1963). The first International
Congress of Psychodrama took place in 1964 in Paris.

Moreno married three times,
the last wedding took place in 1949 when he married Zerka Toeman.
She became a psychodramatist and worked closely with him for
the final quarter-century of his life. Moreno died in Beacon,
NY on May 14, 1974.

Theory and Practice

It would be nearly impossible
to provide a comprehensive summary of Moreno's thoughts here.
Readers are advised to consult the online references below in
Blatner (2002 a, b). A brief summary of Moreno's importance to
narrative should begin with acknowledgment of the centrality
Moreno ascribes to creativity in human life. He felt that,
unfortunately, many individuals were stuck; they had become mired
in ways of responding which reflected a profound lack of
creativity. Moreno termed the ability to deal flexibly and creatively
with new situations as spontaneity. This term refers to
a kind of freedom individuals have in their encounters with new
situations to employ novel or adaptive actions fitting with the
specifics of the situation. Therapeutic intervention, then, should
increase the spontaneity of individuals in the ways in which
they lead their daily lives.

For Moreno, human beings should
not be understood primarily as biological organisms which, as
a by-product of functioning, display a circumscribed mind or
psyche. Rather, the body forms an inner biological core which
is surrounded by the psyche and that psyche, in turn, is surrounded
by the social world (Moreno, 1943). Moreno employs two helpful
concepts to define the relationship of the individual with society.
The first is the "social atom" which represents "the
smallest social unit within the social group. Every person is
postively or negatively related to an indefinite number of socii
who in turn may be related to him positively or negatively"
(Moreno, 1943, p. 324). Moreno pictures each of us as related
reciprocally or simply by a one-way interest to a world of other
persons. This matrix of persons serves as our social atom. This
matrix itself is embedded within a broader notion of the "cultural
atom." By this Moreno means the multiple roles and counterroles
which an individual must play toward the members of his or her
social atom. Since we may often play more than one role in our
relationship to another person, our cultural atom is, of necessity,
larger than our social atom.

Psychodrama is the overall
technique which Moreno advocated to address the psychological
and social needs of individuals. A psychodrama session takes
place on the stage. There the individual protagonist can explore
imaginatively the many roles he or she plays with others. A director
of the psychodrama (the "therapist" in conventional
language) suggests actions or scenes for the protagonist to act
out. Assisting the protagonist are a set of "alternative
egos" -- individuals on the stage who can serve as foils
or stand-ins for others in the protagonist's social atom. The
audience, Moreno believes, becomes a "silent partner"
in the action on the stage as they witness the protagonists working
through the conflicts, role disequalibria, and dead ends of their
lives. Within psychodrama, Moreno developed a set of "deep
actions" or dramatic techniques to foster the therapeutic
goals of the psychodramatic stage. These include role reversal,
the empty chair (before Fritz Perls did), the magic shop, the
double, the mirror, and other means (Greenberg, 1974). Moreno
also extended the notion of psychodrama to what he termed sociodrama
-- the stage-based involvement of multiple individuals who address
issues of interpersonal relations or collective ideology.

For narrativists, Moreno's
influence has been important and seminal. The use of drama fostered
an awareness of how patients could build stories -- creating
meaningful connections between events in life which otherwise
may have seemed disparate or isolated. Moreno himself was convinced
that a crucial advantage of psychodrama lay in its ability to
mold or play with time: protagonists could go back to long-forgotten
scenes in their lives or advance many years into hoped-for futures.
Secondly, Moreno's therapeutic work rejected the autonomy and
insularity of the psychodynamic patient: all individuals are
profoundly related at every moment to the social and cultural
world in which they have developed and now live. Thus, any treatment
modality must deal with that social reality. Further, Moreno's
emphasis upon the multiplicity of roles in the daily lives of
his patients advanced the importance of role theory and its potential
to explain more fully the actual situation of the self. Finally,
Moreno spurred others to advance his ideas, e.g., Ted
Sarbin encountered Moreno early in his career and found Moreno's
emphasis upon role helpful in advancing his own thinking.

Michael Murray "is Professor
of Psychology in the Division of Community Health, Memorial University
of Newfoundland, Canada. Prior to that he held positions in St.
Thomas's Hospital Medical, London, UK and in the University of
Ulster, Ireland. He was Chair of the Health Psychology Section
of the Canadian Psychological Association and founding Editor
of the Canadian Health Psychologist. He has published widely
in the field of health psychology." Quoted from <http://www.med.mun.ca/health99/speakers.htm#MICHAEL%20MURRAY>

Navone, John

Neimeyer,
Robert A.

Robert Neimeyer "is Professor
of Psychology at the University of Memphis, Tennessee and a clinical
psychologist in private practice. " Since completing his
doctoral training in clinical psychology at the University of
Nebraska in 1982, he has written extensively on constructivist
approaches to psychotherapy, with a special emphasis on the experience
of death and loss...He is currently working to extend an understanding
of grieving as a meaning making process, and to advance a constructivist
approach to psychotherapy process and outcome. Neimeyer is Editor
of both theJournal of Constructivist PsychologyandDeath Studies." Quoted from <http://neimeyer.psyc.memphis.edu/genbio.html>

Walter Jackson Ong, Jesuit
priest and humanist scholar, was born in Kansas City, MO on November
20, 1912. He attended the Jesuit-run Rockhurst College in his
hometown from which he was graduated in 1933. Two years later
(after a brief career in the publishing and printing business)
he entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and attended Saint
Louis University (SLU) from which he received a licentiate in
philosophy in 1940, an M.A. in English literature in 1941, and
a licentiate in sacred theology in 1948. His doctoral studies
in English were completed at Harvard University from which he
received a Ph.D. in 1955. In 1953 he joined the faculty of SLU,
his principal academic home, an an instructor in English and
was subsequently promoted to assistant professor (1954), associate
professor (1957), and professor in 1959. In 1970 he was appointed
a professor of humanities in psychiatry by the SLU School of
Medicine and, in 1981, was named University Professor of Humanities.
He reached emeritus status at SLU in 1984. Throughout his career,
Ong held many visiting professorships and lectureships in the
US, Canada, the UK, and elsewhere. He died at age 90 on August
12, 2003 in St. Louis, MO.

Ong's scholarly interests
have been vast and reflect his role as a kind of modern Renaissance
figure. He was an early student of the literary scholar and communications
theorist, Marshall McLuhan, at SLU in the 1940s though the later
McLuhan probably learned as much from Ong as Ong did from him.
At Harvard, his doctoral work on Peter
Ramus (1515-1572), the early modern rhetorician and educational
innovator, alerted Ong to the crucial distinction between knowledge
experienced via hearing vs. seeing (Farrell, 2000, p. 27). "I
came across the difference between the Hebrew idea of knowing
and the Greek idea of knowing...I realized that though intellectual
knowledge has likenesses to all the senses, the Greeks were thinking
of it more by analogy with seeing, whereas the Hebrews thought
of knowledge more as if it were hearing" (Ong, 2002, p.
80). Influenced by Milman
Parry, Eric
Havelock, Jack
Goody, and other theorists and anthropologists of classical
oral culture, Ong charted the historical development of written
("chirographic") language as a technological innovation
with profound cultural effects.

Ong (1982) constrasts written literacy with the cultural
implications of language expressed in its original or primary
oral form. For Ong, writing serves to divide or alienate
people from their experience of both the external world and themselves.
Written language facilitates more abstract and theoretical explorations
in thought while objectifying spoken language in a way which
robs it of its dynamic function as, primarily, an action or a
doing. Ong believes, therefore, that written language actually
restructures human consciousness. This noetic change can be seen
especially in the way memory functions in an oral-aural world
vs. one which is primarily visual. Without the ability to store
knowledge by means of writing as a prostethic enhancement to
memory, the sum of a culture's heritage must be committed to
human memory. Song, spoken myth and story, and other participatory
dramatic and spoken productions often carry a community's memory.
As a further consequence of the differences between the functions
of speech and writing, texts serve in some fashion to fictionalize
both the author and the reader of the printed word.
Why? They must resort to a medium which cannot capture how people
actually talk and interact--those intonations and the broad array
of nonverbal gestures which lie at the heart of oral expression
as an activity.

Ong's discusses the impact
of the oral --> written shift upon narrative particularly
in the sixth chapter of his 1982 volume. In oral cultures, narratives
tend to be more open-ended and the storyline much less linear.
Ong notes that "an oral culture has no experience of a lengthy,
epic-size or novel-size climactic linear plot. It cannot organize
even shorter narrative in the studious, relentless climactic
way that readers of literature for the past 200 years have learned
more and more to expect..." (Ong, 1982, p. 143). Further,
as noted above, without the technology of writing which can make
quasi-permanent the knowledge of a community, "oral cultures...use
stories of human action to store, organize, and communicate much
of what they know" (Ong, 1982, p. 140). In contrast, characters
in the stories crafted in contemporary literary cultures tend
to be less "flat" and more "rounded," i.e.,
drawn with greater complexity of interior structure and motivation.

Ong, W. (1967). The presence
of the word: Some prolegomena for cultural and religious history.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Reprinted 2000: Binghamton,
NY: Global Publications, Binghamton University Press). This work
collects his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University and is considered
by many among his very best works.

Ong, W. (1982). Orality
and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London &
New York: Methuen. (2nd ed. published, 2002, London & New
York: Routledge).

Ong, W. (2002). An Ong reader:
Challenges for further inquiry (T. J. Farrell, & P. A.
Soukup, Eds.). Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press. This collection of
28 essays by Ong offers a comprehensive review of his scholarly
activities. Farrell's introductory essay, Walter J. Ong's Work
and Western Culture (pp. 1-68) offers a detailed overview of
Ong's contributions as well as a fine short biographical look
of the subject. Both here and in his 2000 volume, Farrell becomes
contentious with many of his critics and those of others in the
media ecology movement (McLuhan and Ong among them).